Strong bidentate bonding, such as hydrogen bonding with catecholic groups, chelation to metals, and metal-oxygen coordination of the catechols and their applications as primers containing a catechol functional group are known in the art. These catecholic compounds form strong hydrogen bonds and chelating bonds with different minerals and metal oxide surfaces.
Photo-cleavage of a building block at specific sites has been reported in patents [e.g., photo-cleavable linkers for oligonucleotides (EP0233053A2), nucleotide (U.S. Pat. No. 5,241,060) for nucleic acid sequence determination (U.S. Pat. No. 5,366,860)] and non-patent reports [e.g., photo-cleavable degradation (depolymerization) of hydrogels (see Z., Shafiq et al., Bioinspired Underwater Bonding and Debonding on Demand. Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 51, 4332-4335 (2012)), photocleavable dissociation of block copolymer micelles (see B. Yan et al., Near-Infrared Light-Triggered Dissociation of Block Copolymer Micelles Using Upconverting Nanoparticles, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 133, 19714-19717 (2011)) and DNA labels (see B. Nie et al., Surface invasive cleavage assay on a maskless light-directed diamond DNA microarray for genome-wide human SNP mapping, Analyst 140, 4549-4557 (2015)]. To date, there appears to be no reports on the use of a photo-cleavable primer for debonding or cleaving of adhesives; although ultraviolet (UV)-initiated photo-cleavable co-monomer has been claimed as one of the ingredients in a dental composite (PCT/US2007/014158) and copolyester network (see S. M. June et al., Photoactive Polyesters Containing o-Nitro Benzyl Ester Functionality for Photodeactivatable Adhesion, The Journal of Adhesion 89, 548-558 (2013). When crosslinked/cured adhesives are used, the debonding of adhesives is very difficult or seemingly impossible without breakage or fracture of the glued/bonded/adhered objects or the surface of the objects.